Anna Ridler spins the sublime out of cold, hard data. One of her early collaborative works, Alice and Bob (2017) is composed of two screens that display love letters between an imaginary couple. The declarations are so emotive it is hard to believe that the generative algorithm behind them is trained solely on sterile, scientific texts. “Is this all we should expect? We hoped for more,” one machine asks the other. Anna uses artificial intelligence to better understand human desire and how it is projected onto the world in the form of what we value. In subversive works like TTL (2023), a series...
Bio
Anna Ridler (she/her) was born in 1985 in London, where she continues to live and work.
Tricks on-chain
Bloemenveiling (2019) is a series of generative tulip videos sold as NFTs via smart contract. Much to the dismay of collectors who failed to read the fine print, the artworks were programmed to self-destruct one week later. While traces of the project survive across the internet, none of the tulips themselves remain.
On AI
“There is always a human decision somewhere along the chain of using AI – even something as simple as a tulip is difficult to put into discrete categories - is it white or pale pink? Is it orange or yellow? If this is difficult for something as simple as a flower, imagine how difficult it will be for something as complex as gender or identity.”